Rest In Peace, My Angel
by Anonamazing
Summary: With Joker gone, how will Harley Quinn survive alone in a place like Arkham City? Immediate game end; a prequel to Harley Quinn's Revenge. Joker x Harley
1. Chapter 1

**Title: Rest In Peace, My Angel  
Category: Games » Batman: Arkham Asylum  
Language: English**

**Rating: Rated: K+**  
**Genre: Hurt/Comfort/Drama**  
**Published: 08-27-12**

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**Chapter 1: Chapter 1**

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Harley sat bolt upright. It was no use- she couldn't sleep. Her hand shook underneath the bed sheet as she drew her face into her chest, trying to compress her racking sobs. She shuddered, a cold chill racing up her back. She hadn't bothered to change upon their return from the Monarch Theatre; what would be the point? She'd only have to get dressed again tomorrow.

Harley glanced at the cot in the corner of the room, illuminated only by the glare of police helicopters raging above Arkham City. They'd come for her soon, she was sure of it; they would barge into her home with their guns and their brawn and their hatred, and they drag her back to Arkham by her hair.

Harley hated her cell in the asylum; it was cold and dark and smelled like mouldy old socks. She thought about how lonely she would be and shuddered; most of the people there hated her; the Riddler called her an ignoramus whenever they crossed paths in the cafeteria, and the others used to joke that she was so stupid that she probably thought it was some sort of dinosaur.

Harley wasn't stupid. Harley had a degree; she was Doctor Harleen Quinzel after all, underneath all of the makeup and the silly voice that Mr. J liked her to use. She was charming and she was silly, she liked a laugh and liked to please her Puddin', but she wasn't _stupid._

Ivy would have stuck up for her if she'd been there, Harley knew, but they always kept Red in a separate part of the grounds because the exercise yard which the inmates shared was in an open area, so they'd tread mud and leaves through the corridors and bring spores in on their clothes, and it just wasn't safe to have Pammy around plants.

Last time she was there she'd shared a cell block with the Mad Hatter and Two-Face, but Harvey hated her almost as much as the Riddler did; after he'd called her 'the Joker's dumb bitch,' she'd taken to calling him Poo-Face, and he had hated her even more. Crazy old Jervis was always too busy with his hats, so she didn't have that many people there talk with, except the guards, and they usually just stared down the front of her t-shirt whenever she tried to ask them something. At one time she'd had a friend in there- his name was Mr. Wesker and he'd been a ventriloquist. He would make Harley laugh by making it sound as if the guards were saying funny things to one another, and had tried to teach her how she could talk without moving her mouth, which had made calling Harvey 'Poo-Face' al the more fun. Harley had been very sad when Mr. Wesker had been transferred to Blackgate and declared sane. He was probably somewhere here in Arkham City, just like Ivy, Selina and all of the others were, but she hadn't seen him yet. She wished he was here now.

Harley hadn't thought much about the police taking her in until that moment; she had only wanted her puddin' back. She had slumped to the floor screaming outside the Monarch theatre, and would never have moved were it not for Spider, the Joker's semi-favourite henchman, lifting her and poking her back towards the steel mill before Gordon's filthy pig-cops could swarm. There had been cheers as the entourage had walked in, but they soon diminished once everyone became aware that Joker wasn't with them. Harley had dragged herself up the stairs and into her and Mr. J's room, had lay down on the bed, and this was the first time she'd moved since.

_And where were the Hyenas?!_ They had been missing for nearly a week. _Poor Bud and Lou, out there all alone. _Joker had jested that they might have been devoured by Killer Croc, if he really was down in the sewers- since then, Harley hadn't been able to get the thought out of her mind.

_Poor Babies. _

_Poor Puddin'._

Standing, Harley kicked at the scatter of failed pregnancy tests as she made her way over to the baby crib. Her heavy metal-plated boots crunched the glass screens of the pregnancy tests, making their little dash-signs of failure less readable.

"Out of sight, out of your mind," she whispered, quoting one of Joker's many warped sayings. He'd used that one when he'd blinded one of the guards at Arkham by gouging out his eyes with a plastic fork. The thought made Harley grimace slightly, but her Puddin' always knew what he was doing; and it had been a little bit funny, watching as the other guards had come falling all over themselves to stop Mr. J in action; what hadn't been funny was the black eye she'd received, even though she'd been on the other side of the room at the time trying to explain the rules of comedy to one of the intern psychiatrists. That fork episode had awarded her Puddin' a good few months in solitary, so nobody but the guards saw his health deteriorating from the Titan formulae he had subjected himself to that night when they'd taken over the asylum.

Harley glanced at the outfit she'd worn, raised on a podium and surrounded by theatre lamps, glittering and gleaming invitingly. She had liked her costume, but Mr. J had liked it more so, and had often joked that he preferred seeing it on the floor. She'd always been a fan of playing dress-up, and had managed to smuggle it out the night she and Joker had made their escape into Arkham City. The nurse-esque style seemed more appropriate here than back there; after all, she had spent her time here in Arkham City trying her very best to help Joker get better. And it hadn't worked.

Silent tears began to roll down Harley's face as she attempted to put those horrid thoughts aside, and reached down for the mutated ventriloquist's dummy sat inside the cot. She cradled it in her arms. "Hushaby baby, on the tree top..." she sang a little less than half-heartedly, "don't say a word... momma's gonna buy you a... a..."

Her sentence trailed off as she looked again at the pregnancy tests, all but one reading negative. She'd never felt so alone before. Her last chance of holding onto part of Mr. J was extinguished.

Harley let out a breathy sob and looked down at the doll in her arms. Mr. J had loved this puppet; not as much as he had loved her, of course, but she sometimes felt strangely jealous when the two of them would sit together in the corner of the room, laughing raucously over some private joke Harley had no right to be involved with. She'd managed to get rid of the first one by 'dropping' him into a smelting vat. She had felt a little bit bad about it because Mr. Wesker had always talked about the puppet and Harley knew he'd be very upset about her killing him, but he had to go. He was more trouble than he was worth, and everybody knows that three's a crowd, especially in a monogamous relationship.

Unfortunately for Harley, though, Mugsy Binks- some stick that'd been holed up at Blackgate before being transferred over to Arkham City- showed up at the steel mill one day with a box full of the ugly buck-toothed dolls. Harley had carelessly destroyed the next one in a wood chipper, and by the time she'd accidentally set off a round of explosives downstairs, and in doing so destroyed the third of Mugsy's Scarfaces, she was quite sure her Puddin' was beginning to suspect something. She'd then found out that Mugsy's supply of puppets was in fact inexhaustible, as he had been carving each one himself. Binks was swiftly sent away on a suicide mission to steal some supplies from Penguins men. Safe to say, no one had heard from Mugsy Binks since. He was either dead, Harley guessed, or Batman had got to him; maybe a bit of both.  
No more Mugsy. No more Scarface. _Good riddance, _she'd thought. But now, looking down at the limp puppet curled in her arms, she felt glad she hadn't gotten around to melting him with an acid flower or "accidentally" splintering him with her mallet.

Harley blinked as she sat back down on the bed, still cradling the garishly-painted Scarface, and rocked him back and forth in her arms numbly.  
"Patta-cake, patty-cake, baker's man..."

There was a groan of metal and Harley raised her head to the door. She wiped away her mascara-stained tears as it opened.

"Harley?" Said a voice- _Spider._

"Oh... hi, Spidey," Harley replied without looking at him- her eyes were welling.

"You okay?" he asked, moving a string of brightly-coloured bunting from his eye line as to enter the room more easily. Harley stood, putting down her puppet without answering the question; she looked at Spider and smiled with as much strength as she could muster. She didn't want to- _couldn't-_ talk about what had happened. It hurt enough to be thinking about it constantly.

"Did you find my babies yet?" She said, setting Scarface delicately back down in his cot.

"Urh... yeah. It's not good, Harley."

"What's happened to them?!" Harley cried, her eyes beginning to stream again. The henchman shifted uneasily, clearly unsure how to word his response.

"They got shot," Spider said eventually.

There was a sickening pause for a moment, then Harley cracked.

"Nooo!" She wailed, throwing herself face-down onto the quilt and sobbing again. "Oh, Bud, Lou! My poor babies... and- and my Puddin', my poor Puddin'! Why, Spider, why is this happening?!"  
"They're in the Penguin's museum," said Spider, awkwardly dismissing her question, "he's got 'em stuffed in one of them glass cage things he's got. We got inside and... there's one made for you. And one for Joker."  
"What?" Choked Harley, her face still buried in the covers. "W- what for?!"  
"Uhh... he was gonna stuff J or somethin', if he'd got his hands on him, or flay him alive... there was something said about seein' if he was white as snow all the way through. And you... I dunno, said somethin' about minutes of entertainment or somethin' like that. Reckon he reckoned him and his men were going to have ya, if you get what I'm saying. Sommat about cuttin' your head off and- um- stickin' it on one of them intercom things you've got around the place."

A choked mix of anger and tearfulness came from Harley as she briefly attempted to sit up. Failing, she flayed her arms against the bed sheets and lay atop them, exhausted. Spider's footsteps cautiously crossed the room and the lock of the door clicked. Harley paid no attention, mentally tortured by the last few hours.

Or was it the last few days? The last few _months?!_ Things seemed to have been getting worse day by day. Mr. J's illness, the babies disappearing, conditions in Arkham City. The men had begun to complain about the lack of real food; it seemed candy floss and corn dogs wasn't the most balanced diet. But it was all they had; food drop-offs were becoming less and less frequent, and the chances of actually acquiring the food was less than 50/50. With Penguin's Birds running around the place and the stragglers of Two-Face's Burn-Outs, not to mention the few guys around who'd kept themselves to themselves and not signed up with anybody, the Carnie's food supply had been limited to only what had been looted from the various carts and stalls Joker had taken from the old Gotham fairground. J had laughed and said that the Hyenas were better off missing, as the men would only have eaten them anyway. At this Harley had become very upset and had questioned almost all of the Carnies via the Harley Head intercoms. The truth felt far worse.

"You okay?" Said Spider's voice, and Harley flinched, all but forgetting he was there.

"Yeah," she lied into her fingerless gloves, "I'll be fine."

"You sure?"

"Yeah." It was harder to lie this time.

"Good." Spider sat on the end of the bed, his hands tense, pressed against his knees. "It must be hard for you," he said, placing a broad hand on Harley's shoulder. He was a tough-skinned man, a little younger than she was, with a hard face to match and unforgiving features. The tendrils of a spider web tattoo climbed up his thick neck and down one muscular arm, the reason for his nickname. A deep scar carved its way up the inside of his left forearm, and another deep gash splintered his eyebrow, a notched-in scar from long ago; Joker had thrown an alarm clock at him, Harley seemed to remember, after some crack about time flying when you're having fun.

"Losing Joker," Spider said, bringing Harley back to the real world, "everything that's happened in the last few months... you've had it tough, Harleen."

"Yeah, I have," she admitted freely. "Don't... don't call me Harleen. I don't like that name."

"Whatever you say, Harls."

_Harls is a little familiar, too,_ she thought, though didn't say anything. In less than a second she felt Spider's hand trail from her shoulder down to her waist, and then back up her front to cup her breast. He squeezed her hard and let out a sigh. She wrenched away in horrified shock.

"What the heck was that?!" she yelled, "who the hell do you think you-!"

Without another word, the henchman grabbed hold of Harley and pulled her to him, smashing his lips against hers in a forceful kiss.

**AN: Hey, guys! Hope you liked the first chapter. Thus story was originally published on my other account, but I've made that one exclusively for my fics which have over 100 followers. Leave a review if you can, and I look forward to seeing you again! All the best!**


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2: Chapter 2**

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Harley, crushed against his chest, found for a few seconds that she couldn't react, too stunned to do anything. But the second realisation hit, she pushed away as hard as she could, pulling her lips back from the henchman's. His own followed her path, his hand locked across the back of her neck so that she found it impossible to pull away. Angry and desperate, Harley dug her chewed-down nails into the fabric of the Henchman's shirt, digging into his skin so that he let out a cry of pain and finally released her.

"Get offa me!" She screamed, pulling herself up from the bed and drawing away defensively, "you come up here and try to make a move on me, and my Puddin' hasn't even gone cold yet! ...Get out!"

"Come on," he said with a breathless laugh, grabbing her by her satin gauntlets and pulling her closer, "Harls, you-"

"I said_ offa_ me, asshole!"

She whacked him again, as hard as she could against the side of his head, and he pulled her at arm's length and glared into her face. She was a mess, all smudged grease paint and ruined mascara. She protested like a child, so he treated her like one.

"Calm down, Harley," Spider said matter-of-factly, but Harley screamed over the top of him.

"I'm serious, Spider!"

"So am I."

Harley stopped dead for a second, staring at him. A thousand emotions bubbled inside of her, unhealthy, strangled emotions that she had supressed for years. She'd never needed them with Joker by her side.

"How dare you?!" She spat at him, "how dare you come into my home and try somethin' like that?! You think just because J's gone you can do whatever the hell you want?!"

Spider laughed, his demeanour becoming darker.

"Yeah, actually," he smirked, "what were you expecting was gonna happen when the Clown died?"

Harley stared at him, some ugly monster rearing its head in her belly. Another demon she'd been fighting.

"What," continued the henchman, "that suddenly all the guys are gonna find some sort of respect for you?!" He laughed again, mirthful spite in his venomous voice.  
"You really think you could ever be in charge here? The only reason anyone's put up with you this long is because you're a bit of eye candy around the place. These are Joker's men, not yours. No-one here signed up under some stupid bimbo."

Harley frowned, her speech stunted.

"Let me tell you, Harley, there ain't one person in this God-damn city that don't see you for what you are- just some dumb bitch who's too big for her boots. Joker's dumb blonde bitch. That's all you ever were to him, and that's all you're ever gonna be."

"You're wrong!" Harley screamed, tears threatening her vision, "my Puddin' loved me! He loved me more than anything! We- we were gonna get married! As soon as he'd killed the stupid Bat, we were gonna get married and he was gonna give up all the crazy stuff! We were... we were gonna have a baby."

Spider scoffed again, raising his eyebrows at her. "Bullshit," he exclaimed. "D'you seriously believe that? You honestly believe that crazy bastard loved you? The only thing your 'puddin' loved was himself, and maybe Batman."

"That's not true!"

"Face the facts, Harley. You meant nothing to him. You were just a chew toy, something for him to play with when there was nothing good on the Disney Channel."  
"He watches Cartoon Network," Harley said quietly, shaking slightly as she absorbed all that had just been said to her. It wasn't true, none of it. It couldn't be true.  
There was silence for a few seconds, all but the fading tune of the Harley Head intercom of which Batman had cruelly blown the head off.

Harley felt tears of frustration spilling from her eyes as she turned her back on the henchman and stared out at the burning city before her. There seemed to be even more helicopters now, many of them circling the flaming remains of Wonder Tower. Harley could see the roof of the Monarch Theatre, where it had happened. A dozen cop cars were parked outside, their lights glaring blue and red. It made Harley feel physically sick.  
Then something happened that made her feel even worse.

She felt his arms creep around her waist. Harley tugged away and pulled at him, but he wouldn't let go.

"Get off," she said, surprisingly calmly for the state she was in. He ignored her, gripping tighter and burying his face into the side of her neck, and began to kiss it roughly. "Stop it!" Harley cried, trying to force herself out of the man's grip, but he continued to disregard her cries, pulling her tighter, his clammy hand working at her waist. Harley screamed, screamed as loud as she could, and a laugh came from the henchman.

"You think anyone's coming to save you?" He said huskily, then he turned Harley sharply and pushed her face-first onto the bed. She screamed again, more of a roar than a cry for help this time, then flipped over and struck him in the chest with her boot when he tried to pounce. He hardly seemed to notice, pinning her down despite her best efforts to prevent such from happening, his hands fumbling all over her to untie buckles and straps, to slip between fabric and find her skin. Harley managed to strike him across his greedy face with one of the jagged bangles around her wrists, and he faltered for a second. She used the opportunity to escape from the bed, but in a moment she felt a thick hand tug at her ankle and she was sent crashing to the floor. Papers and pens bounced from Joker's desk as Harley struggled to get away from the henchman, who was already upon her. She hit him again, and he gave some sort of growl before striking her back, right across the face. She was stunned for a moment, but she'd put up with far worse than a single hit and wasn't about to give in so easily like some defenseless girl. Scrambling backwards, Harley's armored boot kicked out at her old costume, circled by a halo of stage lights, and the mannequin began to quiver. Seeing a chance for a few seconds delay, Harley kicked out at it again, purposely this time, and it began to topple, right on top of the henchman. Those few seconds were all Harley needed, and she was up on her feet searching for a weapon before Spider even knew he'd been hit.

Frantic, Harley's eyes fell on only one object; a present from Mr. J, crafted by Mugsy Binks before his 'unfortunate' disappearance. An over sized wooden mallet, painted in a dizzying swirl of purple, red and green, propped against the far wall. She hadn't thought much of it when he had given it to her, preferring to use her white-and-red striped baseball bat instead- in fact, it hadn't left it's position against the wall since she'd been given it. Now, though, it was calling to her.  
In less than a second she had it in her grip, and stood above the henchman who was now getting to his feet, ready to go after her again. Before he had the chance, she swung the mighty hammer and brought it straight down across the back of his head with all the force she could muster. It took a second, but the blood ran from his large face and he dropped like a ten ton weight, sprawling out on the floor, face buried in the wooden paneling.

Harley stood over him a moment, his great hulking mass now degraded and completely nonthreatening. Harley shook her head, then turned her back on him and bent down to prop her fallen mannequin back on its dazzling stage. The boots had fallen and the mask unwound, but Harley replaced them to their rightful positions swiftly. Then she took up her hammer again, sat down on the edge of the rumpled bed and lay it firmly across her lap, examining its array of colour and careful design. On one face was painted the grin of a clown, on the other was a message, messily hand-engraved into the surface.

_To my favourite little Harlequin._  
_Lots of love, Mr. J xx_

A small smiley face was carved underneath the image. Harley reflected it upon her own features, tears streaming her face once more. She traced her fingers across the little carved smile and breathed.

"See?" She sighed contently, "I told you he loves me."


End file.
